Most east-west streets are named after flowers, shrubs, and trees. Iris Street, Primrose Road, and Geranium Street are but a few flower-inspired street names.

Georgia Avenue is the only commercial corridor near the neighborhood.

Local architecture includes colonials (both traditional and Spanish style), ramblers, Tudors, farmhouses, split-levels, and a few Sears bungalows.

History

The neighborhood takes its name from its most famous resident: Alexander Robey Shepherd, the governor of the then-Territory of DC from 1873 to 1874. The neighborhood was originally called Sixteenth Street Heights until it was renamed Shepherd Park in 1943.

Shortly before becoming governor (in 1868), Shepherd built a grand Second Empire-style Victorian that once stood near the corner of Geranium and 13th Street. Shepherd chose the location because of its elevation and its proximity to Rock Creek.

Shepherd dubbed his large country home “Bleak House” after a Dickens novel that he and his wife were reading at the time of their home’s construction. The mansion was demolished in 1916.

Shepherd owned a plant nursery in the District of Columbia, which enabled the 60,000 trees he had planted. His nursery led to a variety of wild flowers that still thrive in the yards of city residents. It is also the genesis of the streets in Shepherd Park being named for flowers.

The Shepherd Park Citizens Association formed 1917 to petition the government to build a neighborhood elementary school and pave 16th Street between Alaska Avenue and the District line.

After developers acquired the land around 1911, they designed it so that the new homes would sit on large tracts of land, and they advertised the location as a “high-class” neighborhood. The developers made sure to retain the large trees in the neighborhood when building the streets. The developers also made sure that the land was bound by covenants prohibiting its sale to blacks and Jews. The covenants stood until after World War II when the Supreme Court struck them down as unconstitutional. At that point, speculators would move a black family into a house on a block that otherwise had white residents. Speculators would then tell the white residents that property values would imminently fall and pressure the white families to sell their homes to the speculators. The speculators would then sell the homes to other black families at large profits. This was called blockbusting. Starting in 1958, the Shepherd Park Citizens Association and Neighbors Inc led efforts to fight blockbusting and maintain the integrated nature of the neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s. It is one of the only neighborhoods on the east side of Rock Creek Park where white flight was stemmed in those years.

In 1985, residents learned that the owner of an apartment building on Georgia Avenue was close to selling the land for a Wendy’s to be built on it. Residents protested, saying that the neighborhood needed a library much more than another fast food location. The District Council decided to build a library on the site instead, and the library opened in 1990. Named the Juanita E. Thornton/Shepherd Park Library, it is named after the neighborhood activist who led the neighborhood association in its efforts to have the library built there.